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Welfare Dependence and Welfare Reform: A Theory of Welfare Privatization
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20075 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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12 / 1992 |
5,194 Words |
| Author
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Charles D. Hobbs
Charles D. Hobbs was chief adviser on human assistance and
welfare policies to President Ronald Reagan from 1984 to
1989. He organized and chaired the president's Low Income
Opportunity Board to encourage state welfare reform
experiments. He is author of The Welfare Industry (Heritage
Foundation, 1978) and is now a management and public policy
consultant based in McLean, Virginia. |
A century of preoccupation with poverty, the poor, and what to do about them has left us awash in costly and ineffective welfare programs. We have programs designed to meet every conceivable need: for cash, food, housing, health care, education, job training, child care, drug abuse treatment, work-related expenses, foster care, child support enforcement, special facilities and equipment for the disabled. For needs too obscure to warrant their own programs, we have a program to meet "special needs." A $200-billion-a-year federally controlled welfare industry dispenses benefits to one in every five Americans. Each new legislative spasm of Congress expands the welfare system and our national commitment to a compassionate but seemingly unwinnable "war on poverty."
Recognizing our failure and blaming tactics rather than strategy, we have mounted "welfare reform" efforts to correct past mistakes and make welfare more effective in reducing poverty. A wide variety of reforms has been tried, but it is not clear whether the reforms have improved matters or made them worse. It sometimes seems that the principal virtue of welfare reform is that, as a term, it sounds better in political speeches than welfare expansion, which is what welfare reform usually turns out to be.
It is time to reassess the strategy: to admit that welfare and welfare freeform, as currently practiced, are collective attempts to solve a problem that cannot be solved collectively. Individuals and families can and do escape poverty, but poverty remains. Why? Because in our society poverty is more then a human condition: it is also a definer of economic class. We use the idea of poverty to define a class of supposedly "unfortunate" people, so that we can also define, by contrast, more fortunate groups--the wealthy and the middle class.
The Idea of Poverty
The idea of poverty is an invention of civilization and a common defining characteristic of modern societies, particularly those that make up what we cal Western civilization. Poverty defines wealth by contrasting those not able to "get by" with those who don't have to be concerned about "getting by." Poverty defines the middle class--capitalism's contribution to modern notions of class--by differentiating those who "get by on their own" from those who don't.
In her meticulously researched books The Idea of Poverty and Poverty and Compassion (Knopf, 1984, 1991), Gertrude Himmelfarb traces the development of the idea of
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